I see a lot of dismissal of very plausible rumors, which may be due to a lack of technical understanding of emerging technologies, who is developing them, and how some of these rumors actually reinforce each other. To be perfectly clear, I have no inside information, and everything I write here is speculation informed by my modest technical background.
1) Higher yields for PS5 APU
Reasons Sony may be seeing higher yields could be due to: TSMC's mature process, a competent COVID-19 response in Asia, and the APU using chiplets.
Chiplets are really important because the main chip can be divided into little lego blocks that are then connected together with something like Infinitiy Fabric. By producing smaller chips on a wafer, fewer chips need to be discarded due to defects, and this is far more important for yields than disabling redundant chip circuitry. Higher yields lower costs and increase production, and chiplets are said to be game changing in this regard. The APU and memory chips are critical components in consoles, and apparently Sony is not having a problem with the supply chain as they have raised their year-end production target to 10 million, which is insane BTW. Peak PS4 sales topped out at about 20 million per year.
2) Specs changing from Cerny's presentation
Cerny probably put his presentation together before a variety of production details were finalized, and so it is not remotely surprising that we could see various upgrades. Console manufacturers can work with an architecture that allows some flexibility, so that they may take advantage of changing market conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic made this a particularly unpredictable year, so flexibility is a real advantage.
3) Significant innovations to RTRT
Realtime ray tracing hardware is pretty new, and developers are only beginning to make use of the technology. Many basic improvements are possible, but including enhancements becomes a matter of cost/performance, especially if a manufacturer sticks their neck out to commit significant die resources to a capability that developers fail to use. For instance, if one manufacturer doubles or quadruples the cache available to the BVH cores, it comes at great cost and only provides an advantage if developers size their data structures to take advantage of it. Comparative benchmarks could destroy their product as not being competitive, even though the new feature, if properly used, offers a major improvement by enabling more intersection calculations. Software developers have little incentive to make use it if the market penetration is really low, so it does not make much sense outside of a mass produced console. Also, improvements to parallelism with AMD's dual compute units might yield better performance for disparate computational tasks that minimize contention over shared resources. With PS4, we have already seen the huge advantage offered by superior asynchronous compute, allowing for a far more efficient use of the GPU. The copious animated foliage of TLOU2 & GoT would seem to provide testament to this.
The issue of slow access to memory or storage limiting computational performance goes back to the very first computers. In the 1940s, Harvard's Mark series of computers calculated at the rate of seconds per instruction, largely limited by the rate the electromechanical perforated paper tape readers could feed data to the adders and multipliers. By 1945, ENIAC demonstrated thousands of instructions per second by using wire plugs and switches to serve as instructions and data, eliminating the need for the tape readers, and no longer stalling the computational components. Today, as processors have increased in speed, memory has been left far behind because of how many clock cycles it takes for the electrons to make the round trip to the memory modules (or other storage system) and back. This disparity is termed 'the memory wall', and it is usually addressed with a cache hierarchy. The PS5's improvements in this area look to be a major technological advancement, and we have already heard some experts qualify this as 'revolutionary'. I do not think it is hyperbole.
4) RDNA 3 features
As was mentioned in Cerny's The Road to PS5, Sony had been working with AMD to develop key gaming related features. We now know that these include enhancements to I/O management, and the geometry engine, a key component that affects the geometric complexity of game visuals. In the PS3 era, SPUs (SIMD/vector processors) were utilized to cull geometry. On PS4, CUs were used. Now there is a dedicated piece of hardware specialized with plenty of improvements for efficiency, some of which have already been suggested in patents. Why is it unbelievable that AMD would not wish to incorporate some of this in future products under the moniker RDNA3? The same may be true for the I/O improvements as well. None of this changes the claim that the underlying technology is based upon RDNA 2.
Sony's studios have some of the most talented game developers in the world, and is entirely plausible that their institutional knowledge can serve as an effective complement to AMD, helping them to envision new features and successfully bring them to market.
Regardless, more reveals are rumored to be coming next month, and a lot of the 'rubber speculation' will finally meet the 'road of reality'.
Gran Turismo wasnt real? All tht Ratchet Gameplay neither and just because you cant discern cutscene from game play in Horizon.
